Tag Archives: 15mm

Back in the days when I still had Fonzie’s Scratchbuilding Service I started working on a series of “Scratch-building the easy way” magazine style books that I was going to publish as PDF e-books because of the high cost of printed books. Nowadays, with decent self-publishing and print-on-demand options available I can probably do them in print too.

Every volume would be about a certain theme, the first one was going to be “How to build a WW2 Normandy Village.” The next volumes would have a similar “village in a box” theme.

The book would give you all you need to build your own buildings with a difficulty level from very easy to medium. It would have templates that you could copy and place on a sheet of Foamboard so that all you had to do was cut the boards and glue them together. After that you could “plaster” the building (will be explained in the book) and of course paint it. The templates would be usable for any scale just by blowing up or reducing them on the photocopier.

Moving to the Philippines and opening MMPS stopped the work on these books but now that I am really retired and moving back to Belgium soon (I hope) I might pick up where I left and produce these books.

But, it is very time-consuming enterprise so I would like to find out first if there is an interest for them. I’m not looking for a big payout but of course I want to be compensated for the time and work I put into producing this series of books so I will not give them away for free.

So my questions are:

Would you buy these books/magazines if I would publish them?

Would you rather have a PDF, a print version or, a PDF and print version in one set?

How much would you consider a fair price for a PDF, for a print version (probably about 100 to 120 pages), for a set (PDF + print version)? Keep in mind that there will be many months of work into these.

What themes would you like to see in this series? For instance a Medieval village, the Waterloo buildings etc… ?

It would be great if you could take a minute to answer these questions for me. Of course if you answer no to question 1 there’s no need to answer the others anymore! Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it!

These are samples of what I was working on in 2009 . These are samples, not a final product, so the pictures in them are not necessarily correct, it’s just to give you an idea. The final version will look similar but better.